Looking After Your Own

Photographing police activity is not a crime, but when it happens during an investigation into serious assaults on women Rockliffe becomes suspicious, and what he discovers puts him in the most disagreeable situation of his career. That last clause is the only critical assessment any source attaches to any episode of this run, and it is a strong one to leave hanging.

The premise is the second series at its most institutional. A photographer watching the police, an inquiry into attacks on women, and a discovery that damages the investigating officer amount to an episode about a force looking after its own, which is what the title says without irony.

David Schofield is credited as Detective Constable Hirst and Jane Gurnett as Val Streetley, and Hirst is the only police guest in the episode, which points the compromise back inside the force rather than at the photographer alone. Gurnett is the hour's only female guest in a story about attacks on women, which is a casting choice the record does not explain. Brian Croucher's Wyatt and Malcolm Terris's Munro are both present, so the episode's two uniformed ranks are on hand for the aftermath.

Brian Thompson wrote this and A Bad Few Days in 1987, and the pairing is consistent: his two scripts are the run's two episodes about the conduct of the police themselves. David Attwood directed, his fourth of five episodes and his last in the second series' first month.

The production is unchanged from 1987, and there is nothing in the record to suggest the episode looked different from its neighbours. Its difference is its subject: a police series in 1988 making an hour in which the police are the parties being watched, and in which the investigating officer is compromised by what he finds.

IMDb holds no rating for this episode, and neither the discovery nor the photographer's fate is recorded anywhere. What the premise does show is how far the series was prepared to go with its own institution, which is further than most of its contemporaries and further than its theme tune suggests.

The episode's place in the run is as the hard counterpart to the domestic hours around it. Two weeks earlier the squad were at a wedding; here the force is the thing under surveillance, and the contrast between the two hours is the clearest illustration of the second series' range. The title says it without irony, and the series never returned to the subject with the same directness.